The Challenge of the American Revolution by Morgan Edmund S

Author:Morgan, Edmund S. [Morgan, Edmund S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1978-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

IV

As the Puritan Ethic helped to give shape to national politics, so too it helped to shape national policy, especially in the economic sphere. Before 1776 the economic policy of the American colonies had been made for them in London: they had been discouraged from manufacturing, barred from certain channels of trade, and encouraged to exploit the natural resources of the continent, especially its land. After 1776 the independent states were free to adopt, singly or collectively, any policy that suited them. At first the exigencies of the war against England directed every measure; but as the fighting subsided, Americans began to consider the economic alternatives open to them.

There appeared to be three possible kinds of activity: agriculture, manufacturing, and commerce. Of these, agriculture and commerce had hitherto dominated the American scene. Americans, in accepting the place assigned them under the British Navigation Acts, had seen the force of their own environment operating in the same direction as British policy: as long as the continent had an abundance of unoccupied land and a scarcity of labor, it seemed unlikely that its inhabitants could profitably engage in manufacturing. The non-importation agreements, as we have seen, had done much to dispel this opinion in America; and the war that followed, by interdicting trade in some regions and hindering it in others, gave a further spur to manufactures. By the time peace came, numerous observers were able to point out fallacies in the supposition that manufacturing was not economically feasible in the United States. From England, Richard Price reminded Americans that their country contained such a variety of soils and climates that it was capable of “producing not only every necessary, but every convenience of life,” and Americans were quick to agree.76 They acknowledged that their population was small by comparison with Europe’s and the numbers skilled in manufacturing even smaller. But they now discovered reasons why this deficiency was no insuperable handicap. People without regular employment, women and children for example, could be put to useful work in manufacturing. Moreover, if Americans turned to manufactures, many skilled artisans of the Old World, losing their New World customers, would move to America in order to regain them. Immigrants would come in large numbers anyhow, attracted by the blessings of republican liberty. The scarcity of labor might be overcome not only by immigration but also by the already explosive native birthrate and by labor-saving machinery and by water and steam power.77

A few men like Thomas Jefferson continued to think manufacturing neither feasible nor desirable for Americans, but the economic vicissitudes of the postwar years subdued the voices of such men to a whisper. No one suggested that the country should abandon its major commitment to agriculture in favor of manufacturing, but it became a commonplace that too many Americans were engaged in commerce and that the moral, economic, and political welfare of the United States demanded a greater attention to manufacturing. The profiteering of merchants during the war had kept the old suspicions of

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